Jargon Watch: Ecoflation

That is the term that Deborah Zabarenko, environmental correspondent for Reuters, uses to describe "the rising cost of doing business in a world with a changing climate.". According to a study by the World Resources Institute and A.T. Kearney, regulation of carbon dioxide will change the way people do business.

For instance, companies that presumed U.S. transportation costs would be low and U.S. labor costs would be high had their goods made in countries where employees would work for less. But a new cost to the carbon emitted by long-distance transport could change that equation, making foreign manufacturing less attractive, Mahler [of A.T. Kearney] said.

the end of the road for the long distance trucker?

Within the United States, there could be a move away from big, centralized manufacturing plants to smaller, more widely dispersed ones, according to Mahler.

"That is not a little tactical change," he said. "It is an infrastructure change that we see companies ... addressing much more aggressively than they had been in the past."